Quotes from Jean-Benoît Nadeau

But the past was never erased, probably because there's just too much of it. Everything in France is built on layers of other things that existed before. The present in France is only a compromise between the past and the present.

France actually had the first ever pension schemes: the Invalides, a hostel built by Louis XIV and his prime minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83), for disabled soldiers.

Americans have no past, while Europeans are loaded down by ancient customs, habits, and prejudices that shape their behaviour.

Ancient Spanish ranching techniques were adopted—and adapted—all over the American continent and took slightly different forms, spawning different vocabulary, from place to place. Argentines call cowboys gauchos; Peruvians, chaláns; Ecuadorians, chagras; Venezuelans and Colombians, llaneros; and Chileans, huasos.

Yet the Visigoths' intangible legacy was far more important: they left behind a powerful myth of a Golden Age of Christian rule that ended when most of Spain became part of the Muslim world. This myth would shape the destiny of Spain and the Spanish language.

There are many theories about how tapas came to refer to food. Some believe early tapas were slices of bread or cheese placed on top of drinks.

Juan Manuel María de la Aurora Fernández Pacheco Acuña Girón y Portocarrero (1650–1726)—the

David Dary, in Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries

The Gaulish language ended up contributing very little to the vocabulary of modern French. Only about a hundred Gaulish words survived the centuries, mostly rural and agricultural terms such as bouleau (birch), sapin (fir), lotte (monkfish), mouton (sheep), charrue (plow), sillon (furrow), lande (moor) and boue (mud)—that's eight percent of the total. However, Gaulish is still relatively well-known, partly because it left many place and family names in northern France.

English is in fact the most Latin, and the most French, among Germanic languages, while French - for reasons that we will see - is the most Germanic among Latin languages. The French and English languages share a symbiotic relationship, and that should come as no surprise, as their histories have been inextricably linked for the past ten centuries.

Few anglophones realize that by keeping French words in the "upper stratum" of their discourse, they are granting French a lofty position in their language and culture. As they export English all around the world, French and its high status have become part of the package. It's one of the least-known explanations for the resilience of French today.

We Americans unjustly hold the French to a New World standard, the authors state. But they're no more New World than the Japanese.

name—Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios Ponte y Blanco—Bol

some reason the French love to laugh at Belgians. Belgian jokes are like Newfie jokes in Canada or Vermont jokes in New England (we can testify that the same cookie-cutter stories circulate freely between languages).